


Ask No Questions

by Sleepmarshes



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Angst, Distressing Situations, Gen, Isolation, super squinty soma and tsustar i guess but this isn't a romance story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-17 06:43:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13071306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sleepmarshes/pseuds/Sleepmarshes
Summary: Pseudo!AU. Maka wakes up to discover the world is a lie.(repost from tumblr in preparation for future updates)





	1. is this the path we must walk

It begins slowly, with mundane things: when the lights flicker with no storm outside, when there's a flash of faces before the television picture appears, when the blood rushing through her ears gives way to hushed voices and words she can’t understand.

She’ll be a hair’s breadth from dreams and hear someone urgently call her name.

And as these things collect, each successive incident a curious grain of rice weighing down in a bag, the sack rips a hole in the bottom. The world seems to fold on itself all at once, collapsing and suffocating, like a book snapping shut the pages of her life.

Maka sits upright in her bed, heart racing for reasons she can’t pinpoint. The very  offness  of the world makes the golden hairs on her arms stand on end.

[ ](http://crazyrebelscarfs.tumblr.com/)

* * *

 

The world is wrong.

She doesn’t want to believe it. She can’t _unbelieve_ it though, which makes everything feel that much more false. Her legs feel numb as she walks to class, her smile like a used car, recently detailed to look new.

She can  see  it now, how fabricated everything is. How had she never noticed?

The world is impossible to look at. Maka can only see shapes in the lacy shadows and heat waves dancing on the horizons of hot asphalt, where she knows there are other truths lurking from her, other knowings. But like all mirages, they are unreachable.

[ ](http://crazyrebelscarfs.tumblr.com/)

* * *

 

“Do you ever feel like… you’re in the wrong place?” she asks Tsubaki, who sits next to her in Calculus. Even now, Maka can see the math exercises her classmate diligently solves on her graph paper are nothing but the jumbled scribbles of dream-numbers; she doesn’t mention this.

Tsubaki Nakatsukasa, elegant swan neck, enviable chest surface area, blinks supermodel lashes as her attention is pulled away from her work. Her mouth twists a little, weighing her question. “I think everyone feels that from time to time, probably,” she says.

Maka supposes any answer would be, at best, philosophical, because who would take that kind of question literally? She pastes on a used-car smile. “Mm. I guess you’re right.”

“Is everything alright?”

Casually waving a hand, Maka says, “Yeah! I’m just… a little out of it today, haha.”  __Out of everything._ _ She looks down at her paper and at the incomprehensible squiggles and shapes that her Calculus is supposed to be. She doesn’t know how she’s going to finish her homework.

[ ](http://crazyrebelscarfs.tumblr.com/)

* * *

 

The air smells stale. Metallic. Like rust and blood. She can’t finish the last lap around the track, and falls to her hands and knees on the football field. It doesn’t even feel like grass. She throws up. Rolls to her back and tries to remember what fresh air smells like. Gazes into the sun and waits for the pain she's been warned about– waits to go blind– but feels nothing.

“Albarn! You okay?”

Black Star enters her field of vision, his sweat-damp hair eclipsing the sun. He looks real. Why does he look real? Why do all the people look real when everything else is clearly fake?

“What color is the sky, Star?” she asks, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and dragging it across the not-grass.

Her friend frowns. “Are you hallucinating?”

“Maybe,” she replies. At least it’s not a lie. “Just answer the question.”

Black Star sighs and makes a show of inspecting the clear sky, muscular arms raised in presentation. “It’s blue. Very blue. Forever.”

Her fake smile is getting a lot of mileage. “Thanks.”

“Seriously, are you sick? I mean I know you can’t beat my mile, but I’ve never seen you  _not_   finish before.”

Maka sits up, trying not to think about the smell of blood. “I don’t feel right.” The sky is a dirty steel gray, like a prison cell. The only blue she can see is her friend’s dyed hair.

Black Star gives her a hand up and Maka tries to commit the feeling of human warmth to memory, because it seems to be the only constant anymore. “Come on, flatty. Let’s go to the nurse.”

She stares blankly at his hand. The nurse. …Why can’t she recall the nurse’s face?

“Now I  know  you’re sick. Didn’t even punch me for makin’ fun of your tits.”

Maka gives his arm a weak tap from a vague fist and realizes she can’t hear the birds singing anymore.

 

* * *

 

A scream tries to claw its way out of her mouth when she walks into the infirmary. Maka presses her lips tight, swallowing a wave of terror and nausea.

She can’t tear her eyes away from it: a twisting, shadowy creature of layered symbols and television static. It forms almost-faces, trying to imitate the gestures of a human being. The chest is a gaping hole, soulless, dark, and empty.

“Hey, Nygus.”

Maka starts, forgetting Black Star is at her side. She stares at him in disbelief as he converses with this illusion like it’s perfectly normal.

The sky is blue for him.

“She puked, says she don’t feel right.”

__Run._ _ That ever-shifting face of the ‘nurse’ who certainly isn’t Nygus (whoever that is) turns in Maka’s direction. It waves her over, cordial. Maka takes a step back, eyes wide.

“What the hell, Maka–” Black Star blurts when she wrenches out of his reach.

“I feel fine,” she says, plastering that smile on her face, voice too loud for the situation. “I’m gonna go back to–” her words die as she sees them,  __more of them_ _ __,__  more shadow people filling the hallways and continuing to their next class in a perfectly orchestrated gaggle of imposters.

She hadn’t heard the bell ring. Maka risks a glance to her wristwatch. The numbers shift and writhe, obscure.

Maka runs.

[ ](http://crazyrebelscarfs.tumblr.com/)

* * *

 

Hidden in the patter of water hitting the shower stall, she hears a murmuring voice. It seeps through the white noise, like a radio picking up a distant station. She shivers. It’s as if she had somehow traded in her father’s voice for someone else’s without ever meaning to.

Meanwhile, her father is outside the bathroom, pacing the hallway and making approximations of worried noises, because shadow people don’t speak real words. She supposes she’d been filling in the blanks her whole life, assuming real conversation and replying in turn– up until she’d realized the world isn’t the world.

She wants to cry. The love she’d felt for her father still exists, swirling a drainage hole in her chest where everything she’d believed to be true whirls away into nothing. She can’t remember what he’d looked like.

__“Can… hear me?”_ _

She can’t stop shivering.

“Yes,” she silently mouths, clenching her eyes shut. Water pours off her scalp and down the bridge of her nose.

__“-nate…me, Maka!”_ _

Maka crouches into a tiny naked ball, her hands forcefully covering her ears. She’s going crazy, surely. She hates this.

__“Please,”_ _  the voice says, like a faint rumble through a thick wall, hardly more understandable than her shadow-father.

Tears burn underneath her eyelids and she tries to stifle a sob. “Give me my papa back,” she pleads in a thick whisper, but there’s no reply.

[ ](http://crazyrebelscarfs.tumblr.com/)

* * *

 

She stays home ‘sick’ for four days. In the interim, she tries to convince herself she’s going mad, that the images she sees when she closes her eyes are hallucinations, that the wind whistling through her cracked window doesn’t sound like whispered promises. Maka keeps her bedroom door locked and discovers her shadow-father still keeps his work schedule.

Though she doesn’t understand what he says through the shut door, as long as she responds as if she  isn’t  losing her mind, the shadow will react accordingly, even if she makes up the subject on the spot. There’s no continuity. Her father is a puppet that improvises his actions off what she says.

This is the extent of her control in a nightmare from which she can’t wake.

Also during her self-imposed incarceration, she eventually decides she’s not going insane, no matter how much she wishes it were true. She doesn’t eat at all during her four days home. She doesn’t die.

The experiment had been purely accidental; her shadow-father had offered her a glass of water when he caught her coming out of the shower. Trapped by fear and morbid curiosity, she’d examined the shapeless blob-hand holding a clear drinking glass that had looked real enough at first. But as Fake Papa came closer, the glare on the glass shifted into telltale hatch-marks and dancing runes, and the water sloshing around inside squirmed a gloaming of maggot-like static.

She doesn’t take showers anymore either.

[ ](http://crazyrebelscarfs.tumblr.com/)

* * *

 

Tsubaki and Black Star show up at the end of the fourth day because she hadn’t been answering the phone.

Maka stands at the front door, unsure of what to say, too swamped in confused relief that her friends don’t have holes in their chests. She hadn’t heard the phone ring at all. (The phone is an amorphous splotch on the kitchen counter, amidst the sketch-like, ever-shifting ruse of the rest of the apartment.)

She tells the truth. “I never heard it ring.”

Her friends exchange glances. Maka searches their faces, their chests. She wants to embrace them but fears she’ll eventually forget them, too. She runs their names in her mind:  Black Star. Tsubaki. Black Star. Tsubaki.

“What’s goin’ on with you, man?” Black Star grumbles. “This ain’t like you.”

Tsubaki says nothing, only looking directly into her eyes, seeking answers Maka can’t give.

“Sorry,” Maka says, sincere, though she swallows a thick doubt in her throat, brought on by her lack of surety in her friends’ existence; if these are people who truly care about her or if she’s merely filling in the blanks.

[ ](http://crazyrebelscarfs.tumblr.com/)

* * *

 

Her world steadily slips into whispers and shadows, her blood burning with need. She gazes into the darkest of fabrications, hoping for some hint or clue to escape this empty reality, or at least undo the curse of awareness so she can return to being Maka Albarn, senior student of Some High School, preparing to apply for Whatever University. (She can’t remember the names anymore.)

Presently she sits in detention, watching runes skitter together like a massive colony of insects assembling in a facsimile of her desk. Fake students– troublemakers and delinquents– serve their time placed around her like a play, each soulless blob shoddily acting their part.

She’s suffering through this session because she hasn’t turned in any homework and has been inadvertently ignoring her teachers when asked to participate. At one point in her life, she would have been mortified at her fall from valedictorian grace. So fully entrenched in this unreality as she is, however, she figures if her transcript doesn’t have any actual numbers on it, it doesn’t fucking matter.

Every moment of every day is a swarm of unresolved yearning, forever reaching for a dream that vanishes at her fingertips. It’s clear to her now that whatever holds this bogus world together wants to keep up pretenses, else she would be able to skip classes without punishment. She wonders why. If the jig is up, why do these creatures keep acting their parts?

When the other ‘students’ rise from their seats and begin exiting the room, she assumes it’s time to go home.

[ ](http://crazyrebelscarfs.tumblr.com/)

* * *

 

Flags and trees sway in a breeze she can’t feel on her face. Empty rain falls from a cloudless slate sky. Like a holographic picture, if she views it from different angles, the world will shift from illusion to the skeleton beneath.

If she doesn’t confide in someone soon, she really will go mad.

“It’s not some disorder or mental illness!” she shouts, at wit’s end. “If the words ‘rebellious years’ come out of your mouth, so help me–”

“I  __am_ _  trying to help you.” Tsubaki’s normally porcelain complexion is mottled and unbecoming with a frustrated flush. “Just tell me what’s wrong! I don’t like seeing you do this to yourself.”

She’d been cornered on her way out of today’s detention. She has a slip of ‘paper’ in her hands that she’d been given by the creature/teacher, but she doesn’t have a clue what it says.

Tsubaki knows, though. The sky is still blue for her. Irritated, she takes the paper out of Maka’s hand. “If you can’t read, and you never hear anyone talking to you–”

“I hear you and Star just fine,” she murmurs, petulant and bitter and grateful all at once. Her fists clench at her sides, the corners of her eyes burning. “I’m not going deaf or blind,” she grits out.  If anything, she sees too well.  Tsubaki gives her a haggard look, holding out the slip to return it.

Maka shies away in reflex; taking it from the not-teacher the first time had been terrifying enough.

Uncharacteristically impatient, Tsubaki says, “Just take it. Mister Albarn needs to see it.”

Something contorts in the drain of her heart.

“…Mister Albarn?” A first name almost comes to her, whispered in a stranger’s voice, hiding amid the sounds of her hair sliding across the fabric of her uniform as she bows her head, trying to remember. She aches with the pain of isolation. Albarn is  her  last name, so surely it is her father’s as well, and as she reaches for a face that refuses to clear up in her mind, the fire in her eyes overflows. Maka accidentally rasps, tears burning her skin, “What does he look like?”

Newfound worry and confusion twists Tsubaki’s face as she drops what Maka later learns is a Parent-Teacher conference notice from her hand.

[ ](http://crazyrebelscarfs.tumblr.com/)

* * *

 

Her friend leads her to Black Star’s apartment, because his parents are never home to ask questions. Black Star is mildly surprised to see them at the door, but after taking in the teary, snotty wreck Maka’s face has become, he lets them in without much hassle.

They sit her down on the kitchen floor, raiding the fridge for what might have been pudding snack packs, once. She is offered an undulating blob of darkness and her stomach lurches. She declines. As pudding is usually her favorite, this prompts a full interrogation, the two of them sitting across from her on squirming linoleum.

“Spill it,” Black Star demands.

Maka wipes her face on her shirt, because the tissue Tsubaki offers isn’t real. The expression her friend wears becomes consistently more hurt with every refusal of something, not understanding Maka’s aversions to everything and taking it personally. “You won’t believe me,” she hoarsely says.

She watches the only two real people in this hell– the only two real anything –  raise spoonfuls of  _ wrong _  to their lips, digesting the silent runes that are in a constant state of unnatural seizure. Maka swallows her own bile, covering her mouth with a hand. “Please don’t eat that,” she groans into her palm.

Her classmates exchange a glance as they tend to always do. A pang of wistful jealousy twists her heart for such companionship. “We’ll believe you,” Tsubaki says as she hesitantly places her pudding on the floor, though Black Star rolls his eyes, finishes his snack, and steals what’s left of Tsubaki’s.

Maka draws her knees to her chest and ignores Black Star’s complaints about unwanted schoolgirl panty-shots. “You won’t. You’ll tell me I’m crazy,” she says into her knees. “I’d say the same thing, really.”

Black Star tosses his not-spoon over his shoulder to clatter in a sink. “Don’t be writing our lines for us. Just get on with it, geeze,” he says to the ceiling, still trying to avoid looking under her skirt.

This will make her even more isolated, she suddenly realizes. The sky is still blue for them, but they will never see her the same way after this. Her only friends will be gone, but they  are  her friends, and if she can’t tell them, she can’t tell anyone.

If she can’t tell anyone, she’ll lose her goddamn mind.

[ ](http://crazyrebelscarfs.tumblr.com/)

* * *

 

The Parent-Teacher conference is boring at best. By the tone of the shadow creatures’ voices, she’s being shamed and lectured, but she can’t even muster up a fake response or act the least bit apologetic. Maka tilts her head and watches the world’s hologram. Soon, she thinks she won’t be able to see any of the illusion at all; the universe will be naught but static and black, and the only colors she’ll ever see will be her friends who can’t look at her with anything other than frustrated pity.

There’s no place for her to be without touching a lie. She shivers in her hard plastic chair-analogue. In scripted worry, Fake-Papa puts a concerned hand on her shoulder. She tries her best not to shriek.

She wonders if it’s worth trying to run away. Would there be a place on this earth she could flee to? She wants to pretend there is, wants to hope that such a thing as ‘escape’ exists, but she has a feeling no matter how far she runs, the sky will never change back.

Hopelessness washes over her, and a student walks into the cafeteria where all the conferences are being held. Among the creatures lecturing other creatures in an over-the-top circus act, someone not made of cross-hatches and runes sullenly takes a seat in a fake chair. Her bobbed blonde hair frames a cherub-like face, blue eyes unfriendly and distant like remote glaciers.

Maka catches the attention of those crystalline eyes, and in the split second that passes between her and the girl,  she _knows_.

[ ](http://crazyrebelscarfs.tumblr.com/)

* * *

 

“What color is the sky,” she asks her when she cuts class and finds her in the sophomore lunch hour the next day.

Patti Thompson is two years her junior, who’d been assigned a conference because of all the fist fights she’d been in. “Steel. Gray.  Ugly.”

Maka says the words she’d been desperate for anyone else to tell her. “I understand,” she replies. “How much do you know?”

The girl’s face is sullen and angry. “Zero. My sis thinks I need a shrink, but we can’t afford that crap so I lucked out. You?”

“Do you… Do you ever hear a voice?”

Patti gives her a look, but it’s not the ‘you’re crazy’ kind of look. She shrugs. “What’s it say?”

Biting her lip, Maka gives her own small shrug. “I don’t catch what he says, usually. He sounds… worried. But most of the time I don’t know if I’m imagining it or what.”

They don’t-eat-their-lunch together in the shade of the school gymnasium, hiding from the not-sun.

“All I know is this ain’t my school,” Patti says, arms crossed and glaring at the pavement.

Confused, Maka asks, “Were you transferred?”

“No,”  the girl spits. “Least that’s what they told me. Sis says we’ve always gone to this school, but she’s  wrong.  I go to  Shibusen.”

Maka rolls the name around in her mouth and wonders why it doesn’t feel as alien as it sounds. “…What is it?”

“I don’t know, but I know it’s mine.” Patti’s fingers claw into her uniform’s shorts. “I remember, ‘cause we never got to go to school, we were broke as shit, and… I feel like–  URGH!”  Maka jumps at the girl’s angry screech. “I know it! I was  glad!  I was excited to go to  __SHI-BU-SEN._ _ They can’t take that from me!”

Maka’s heart picks up speed in her chest.

“I tried to look it up,” Patti continues in a slightly calmer voice. “I was in the computer lab, but all of a sudden I couldn’t read the keys anymore. The screen was just–” The girl held her hands in the air and frenetically contorted her fingers, imitating the rest of the world.

[ ](http://crazyrebelscarfs.tumblr.com/)

* * *

 

If the things she can almost see between the runes aren’t rips in the universe, if the laughter she hears echoing to her through distant dreams are  memories , then are they memories she has forgotten, or memories she is not allowed to keep?

A despairing, logical part of her tells her she may have just reached new levels of paranoia and mental illness, but logic also tells her most people die after so many days without food or water, and therefore she is either immortal or her paranoia is justified.

Patti thinks her sister is real (or at least as real as Maka seems to be, to her), but Liz’s boyfriend is definitely a doppelganger. Including herself, Maka muses, that will make five people with potentially wiped memories caught up in the unreality.

“Shibusen,” she quietly says to her squirming bedroom as she leans against the wall for the night. It sounds foreign, but maybe somewhat like an invocation– like a word that, as long as she has it, will keep her focused and give her hope.

She wonders what kind of school it is. Maybe, if she manages to fall asleep in this terrifying place, will she dream about it?

__“I will get you out, I promise.”_ _

Maka inhales sharply, bolting upright with her heart pounding in her ears. She searches all around, but she’s alone.

It had sounded so close, as if there’d been someone speaking in her ear. The memory of it seeps into and rattles her bones, bordering on the brink of familiarity.

She chokes out a whispered, “Hello?” She waits for what seems like years.

In the harsh stillness, tears break free of her eyes and shoot down her cheeks. She’s used to frustration. She’s used to the fear of going mad. But it’s the unexpected, violent loneliness that catches her off-guard, the silence so painful it makes her cover her mouth so she doesn’t sob so loudly.

There’s no response.


	2. wish i could just hear you talk

Students cram into study groups, filling the library as they prepare for midterm finals. Tsubaki mills among them, smiling gently to one of the shadow creatures, appearing animated and driven in her studies. Then she sees Maka at a distance, and a sadness flickers across her face before she looks away.

Maka hurts, but is relieved that Tsubaki is visible to her again, today. She walks out of the library, determined to find whatever reality she’s supposed to be in and bring everyone else she can still see with her.

She continues her daily rounds by making her way to the school roof. Black Star has gym this hour (so does she, technically), and the track can be seen from the rooftop. It’s as easy as finding the sun to pick him out amidst a sea of runes and darkness.

Glancing at the dirty steel sky, Maka breathes in the coppery scent of blood that is always in the air and wills for the world to break apart, to split open to a place where her dreams are more than faded flashes of color and light.

The world does not split open, despite her best efforts. The sky remains a murky wash of ash.

Sighing, she sits on the school roof, ignoring the handful of students who smoke bleeding clouds of pseudo cigarettes as they cut class. She sprawls back, glaring at everything and nothing. _“Shibusen,”_ she quietly says aloud, head aching as she searches for memories that don’t seem to exist. Nothing comes to mind, no matter how easily the name rolls off her tongue.

She waits for the sophomore lunch hour so she can talk to Patti. Maybe she can learn another secret today.

Maka lays, catatonic, out of ideas and feeling so very hollow. Time stretches on with such dismal lethargy that she fears her brain will go numb, quiet as the silent birds that nest in the white noise leaves of the trees. She has lost track of how many days she has skipped food and drink. If her body harbors any aches or pains, they are superficial and imagined. When she cries, no matter how much her heart hurts, her tears are as empty as the rain.

If everything is an illusion, what does that make her?

Maka closes her eyes and dozes, if only to pass the time and have a reprieve from the myriad of unanswerable questions (is she even alive?) repeating themselves in her head.

From the emptiness of fitful sleep, an image comes, sifting through mist and dark matter. A lone candle burns atop a lake of black, its wick alight with blue flame. Her body seems to float, steadied by something warm. Words form and fade, whispered to her in little waves like a quiet tide washing up and receding from shore. She knows, somehow, that the words are a promise, but she can’t piece them together.

When her eyes open, she’s reaching forward for something that isn’t there, hand grasping the slate sky. The dream fades to nearly nothing, dissipating like smoke.

Maka drops her hand to her eyes and wonders why she has checkered tiles on her mind.

 

* * *

 

As she walks through the doors, she witnesses one of the fist-fights Patti Thompson is known for. How it had started, she doesn’t know, but it’s clear to Maka that the sophomore is vastly outnumbered. There’s an uproar in the cafeteria, a soulless army swarming Patti like a hive colony, their movements systematic and wholly alien.

The majority of the cafeteria is frozen, the performance on pause while the cluster of students nearest Patti are sucked into the fight, flickering shadows converging like a hurricane around a single point. Maka glimpses blonde hair and rushes into the storm, too. As loath as she is to touch them, she forces her way in, throwing fists and elbows into anything that doesn’t hold color. Her feet are trampled and her body jarred, but she tries to remember that none of these things actually hurt no matter how much her mind insists she is in pain. It doesn’t particularly work.

She hears the girl cursing and screeching, but her cries are hard to make out in the chaos. By the time she catches the tiniest hint of Patti, the mob is already dispersing, the younger girl apprehended by school authorities.

“Break it up, break it up!” someone calls, and it takes Maka far too long to place the voice as Black Star’s. Firm hands restrain her as she watches Patti nursing a bruised bottom lip while being escorted by the angrily-chittering administration. The shadow crowd ebbs away as if nothing unusual had taken place at all.

Maka’s feet drag across the floor as Black Star pulls her out of the cafeteria. He’s bitching at her but she’s not paying attention, too focused on Patti’s face and the defeat slipping into the girl’s eyes. Pulled into an empty hallway of lockers and water fountains, she stumbles while trying to find her balance.

“What are you doing here,” she demands, irritated and squirming out of his grip.

“What am  _I_  doing? What are  **you**  doing? You skipped Phys-Ed again,” he nearly hisses at her, teeth clenched in an angry snarl. “I stopped running–  _me,_ you understand?  _I stopped my godly lap record_ – ‘cause I was worried you were having crazy-time somewhere–”

“I’m not crazy!” Seething, she tries to kick at his shins and stomp on his feet, but he easily avoids her.

“If you’re not crazy, then why is Straight-A Albarn getting into fights during  _squashmore_ lunch?”

Maka grinds her teeth at his bluntness. She knows his actions stem from concern, and tries to keep this in mind. Straightening her uniform, as if gaining control over one measly aspect of this world will somehow facilitate the rest, she replies, “I was trying to help Patti.”

Black Star blinks a few times, not appearing to be anywhere close to the same page as she. “…Who?”

She recites, exasperated, “Patricia Thompson, grade ten, and the only person who believes me.”

He sneers. “How am I s’posed to know some tenth-grader when– God,  _another_  crazy person? What’d you do, hypnotize her?” he remarks, sounding tired, a tone so unusual from him that she almost glosses over his accusation.

Almost.

He runs a hand through his blue hair and sighs. “She too good for food, too?”

Holding back frustrated tears because her oldest friend can only treat her like a child who doesn’t know when to stop telling the same bad joke, she slaps Black Star across the face. He hardly budges, but the shock of a slap in lieu of the usual punch or kick stuns him.

He’s one of the only people who are real in her world, and yet she can’t stop herself from screeching, “ _Go to hell, Black Star! Go to hell and **burn!**_ " And she whips around to stomp away from him and his unnatural silence.

 

* * *

 

She has a moment in a bathroom stall as lunch ends and the next class begins. Her heart aches and she can’t convince herself that the pain in her chest is not real. Her hand stings. Doppelgangers warble feigned conversations out in the hallway, lingering until the next class hour starts.

In wake of Black Star’s hostile words, old doubts surface. She wonders if she really is crazy. Maybe all the studying and college prep had stressed her out and now she’s having a never-ending episode of attention-seeking hallucinations.

No. It can’t be. Patti exists, which proves everything  _(_ _unless Patti is a hallucination, too) (stop stop stop stop)._

There’s no time to dwell on it; she has a bad feeling about Patti and needs to know if she’s okay. As soon as the hallways go quiet, she stumbles out of the bathroom and makes a beeline for the main office.

But then, as she hurries through the hallways, something strange happens. Maybe it’s the echo of her feet on the floor, or perhaps the rows of lockers stretching into the distance, their artificial colors blending together with reflected, filtered daylight. Somehow, this place or moment or point in the universe seems to give off a faint hint of familiarity.

She feels as though she has done this hundreds of times before.

Despite her urgency, the moment forces her pace to slow, coming to a stop in the hallway. Recent events jumble her thoughts, muddying her concentration. Maka tries to push these things aside to focus. The memory is so close she nearly tastes it.

Behind her guilt for slapping Black Star and beyond her worry for Patti’s defeated gaze, she feels something missing, like one simple element would resolve this eerie haunting. The more she tries to pinpoint it, the more glaring the emptiness she’s trying to fill becomes. It’s  _vital_ , she thinks– to remember this single thing is necessary and pivotal and  _what the hell is it?_

 _What is it? **What is it?**_   Maka tenuously turns in place, asking, searching, hoping her surroundings might jog her memory further. The lockers and ceiling tiles shift and fade. The hallway loses its illusion, the bare-bones darkness answering her only with lies.

It's gone. She wants to break something. She wants to break.

 

* * *

 

Tsubaki is an office aide this hour– a reward for completing required language credits a semester early– and Maka had hoped she’d be studying for midterms in the main office instead of running errands. A glance inside told her Tsubaki was out, however.

So she waits outside the door, worrying that the girl had disappeared sometime between now and this morning. She tells herself it’s not the time to be panicking over every little thing, but the fact that there aren’t any little things _left_ has a tendency to make her chest painfully constrict. She’d already forgotten her father, real or otherwise; she can’t bear to lose someone else again.

Just as the thought occurs to her that she can still easily recall Tsubaki’s face, the young woman in question rounds the corner of the hallway. Maka sighs a loud  _woosh_  of relief, even if Tsubaki looks troubled and frustrated.

Surprise paints her face when she sees Maka waiting for her, but the expression abruptly morphs, her eyebrows drawing together and her mouth pinching into a tight line. Without her usual pleasantries, she walks up and blurts, “Did you slap him?”

By the way Tsubaki grips the shadowy form of a cell phone in her right hand, Maka can tell she already knows the answer to that question. Grimacing, she tries not to fall down the despairing tunnel of striking someone she’d known since she was three. Black Star is not the reason why she’s here. “More importantly, I need your hel–”

 _“'More importantly’?”_   Tsubaki accuses, eyes narrowing in fury. Maka shrinks back, biting her lip; she could have worded that a bit differently. “I can’t  _believe_  you!”

Cracking under pressure, Maka spits back,  _“_ _I know!!”_   The resounding silence after her outburst is thick and stifling, and Tsubaki stares, shoulders inched high with anger. She only stares, but she’s listening, and the words fall out of Maka’s mouth without her permission. “I didn’t ask you to,” she says, voice falling. “I never once asked you to believe me.”

And she thinks she may want her friends’ belief even more than she wants out of this place. Maka silently curses at herself when tears prick at her eyes. She’s a wreck. She can’t make it a single day without crying, and she’d already done it once today. She can’t look at Tsubaki’s face. “And anyway, he’s a big jerk.”

Tsubaki sighs. “…Regardless of whether you think the world is real or not, Black Star is your  _friend_. He’s been worrying about you.”

“He has a funny way of showing it.” Maka sniffles, petulant, and crosses her arms over her chest. “No. How can I be friends with someone who treats me like I’m nothing but a basket-case?  _I still have feelings._ ”

“Maka,” Tsubaki says gently. She sighs again. “He doesn’t know how to be around you. Neither of us do. But we do care.” Her thumb rubs anxious circles over her cellphone as she tries to find her words. “It’s just… really hard to be a friend right now. We don’t know how to help without making you mad.”

Not treating her like she’s insane is a start, but she figures that’s asking far too much. Tsubaki sounds like she’s going to cry now, so Maka only quietly says, “Sorry,” clenching her arms tighter over herself. “I’m not doing it on purpose. You know I’m not that kind of person, it wouldn’t be like this if I didn’t think it was all true–”

“I know,” Tsubaki admits, hands raised. “I know you wouldn’t– that’s what makes this so hard to understand. I believe that you believe what you’re going through is real. But I…” she trails off, but Maka knows what she’s trying to say.

“It’s okay.” Except it’s not. “I’m not alone anymore. There’s someone else like me.”

Blinking, Tsubaki murmurs, “Like…you?”

Maka takes a deep breath, remembering what she came here for. “She was in the fight in the cafeteria earlier. Have you seen her? Was she expelled?”

“Wait, what? That blonde sophomore? And what do you mean ‘like you’?”

“Tsubaki,  _please_ – I need to talk to her, I’m really worried.”

Tossing her long hair off her shoulder and huffing in frustration, Tsubaki closes her eyes for a moment. “Her older sister came and picked her up. She’s suspended, I think? For getting into so many fights.”

Maka frowns, chewing on a thumbnail in thought. She doesn’t like this. She’d never asked how Patti had been involved in so many brawls, and now she’s regretting it. She doesn’t think Patti would start up a fight just for the sake of it; the girl despised touching monsters just as much as she did. What if remembering 'Shibusen’ had made her a target?

“Maka, what is going on? Is there some kind of emergency? O-other than the usual one, I guess…”

She looks up into her friend’s face and blurts, “I have a favor to ask.”

Warily, Tsubaki replies, “…And?”

“You’re not gonna like it.”

The taller girl looks askance, as if seeking advice from the empty hallway. “I think I kind of knew that, already.”

“I need Patti’s address.”

Tsubaki smiles as if Maka has just told a joke. “Good luck with that, then,” she says pleasantly, turning around on a heel to escape.

 _“Please_ _,_  Tsu,” she calls, desperate.

Whirling back in anger, Tsubaki hisses, “Are you asking me to dig through restricted personal files, because that’s what it sounds like.”

It’s Maka’s turn to hold up the placating hands. “I wouldn’t ask you to do it if I could do it myself.”

“I’m lined up for a really good scholarship, and  **you’re** –” Tsubaki realizes her voice is raised, and grits her teeth before lowering it. “You’re asking me to steal confidential information?”

“You’re the only one I can ask!”

“Maka, I  _can’t–”_

“The only one,” Maka repeats, fists clenched at her sides. “Patti’s gone, and Black Star won’t even… You’re the only one I can talk to.”

Tsubaki makes a strangled sort of whine, pressing her palms to her temples and pushing like she’s trying to keep her skull from splitting open. After, she stands tall, face calm and serene. “Please go to class, Maka,” she quietly says. She walks away without another word.

There’s no one left.

 

* * *

 

Patti doesn’t come to school the next day, which isn’t unusual, but Black Star also doesn’t come to school the next day, which is.

She mulls over the possibilities of why Black Star wouldn't show up, but all signs end up pointing to her. She’d track Tsubaki down to see if she’d talked to him since yesterday, but midterm tests were today, and Maka is stuck in a room with one of the student counselors, alone and trapped on a cushioned armchair made of twisting runes and ebony.

For the first ten minutes of this session, the horror seated across from her had pantomimed worry over her behavior and her stack of black, blank midterm tests she hadn’t completed throughout the day. She hadn’t wanted to play along, though, and after ignoring the shadow and refusing to acknowledge it, the counselor had fallen into silence.

And it occurs to her, after a much longer stretch of time passes, the creature is staring at her. It doesn’t gesture and mumble its way through its ‘reality’-provided lines, doesn’t choreograph its response around her words and actions. Its empty chest is pointed directly at her, the morphing smudge that is its face seeming to steadily bore into her with all the detachment of a security camera.

Her breath quickens, body tensing with apprehension. The creature is rooted to its seat, stock-still and silent while the darkness it holds boils like a contained storm. How long have they been sitting here like this? Is it waiting for some cue from her to continue?

She feels scrutinized. This is not a behavior she’d ever noticed in the shadows before. Maka can’t bear the undivided attention from something so unnatural. Eager to disrupt the silence, she scrambles for something a counselor may want to hear from a wayward student.

“I– I’ll try harder tomorrow.”

The deathly silence that follows is ice in her veins. Her mind darts to Patti, to the crushed look on her face after yesterday’s fight, and suddenly the idea of these things being able to harm people doesn’t seem out of the question.

She’d wanted out of this room before, but now she finds that a more timely escape may be in her best interests as the counselor’s shadows shift and swirl, watching her. Then, like lightning hidden deep in the clouds of its form, the myriad of glyphs and runes on its body erratically flicker in the black. Eyes wide and mouth dry, Maka witnesses the creature light up in unpredictable patterns, as if it is somehow forming a conclusion about her.

It ends as abruptly as it starts, the event passing so quickly it feels half-imagined. The shadow stands from its seat, expressing friendly tones and making vague, parental gestures as it offers incomprehensible parting advice. It glides to the door of the office, opening it and politely dismissing her.

Maka pastes on a tight smile and stands, legs shaking as she walks out the door.

 

* * *

 

Black Star doesn’t come to school the next day. Or the day after.

 

* * *

 

Fake-Papa starts doing the rune thing as she slithers past him in the living room, and she stops short, gut sinking like a stone. Normally, she would ignore his attempts at engaging conversation and lock herself up in her room, but this time the shadow standing in as her father reacts differently, incorporeal limbs lighting up as he observes her retreat.

She doesn’t want to be trapped in a fake house with one of  _them,_  but neither does she want to bring attention to herself, because more and more she’s beginning to think those things are reporting somehow, using those glyphs on their bodies to keep tabs on her and her behavior. She tells herself she is stiffly sitting down on the array of convulsing gloom that is supposed to be their living room couch because she does not want to attract suspicion, and not that she has lost faith in the safety of locked bedroom doors.

Pacified with her interaction, Fake-Papa stops cycling through runes and sits next to her on the couch, turning on the static-filled television to a static-filled channel. Maka glues her eyes to the screen, pretending to be interested in something she can’t see, and silently panics.

 

* * *

 

Steadily, the world is cornering her, and the corner isn’t safe, either. Maka had spent most of the school day trying to find a moment to speak with Tsubaki, even at the risk of making her angry again– if anyone knew if Black Star was okay, it would be Tsubaki– but all her efforts had been thwarted. Every time Maka saw the young woman at the end of a hallway, or at her locker, or speaking with a shadow student, there would always be another creature just around the corner.

No matter where Maka went in the building, there had always been at least one of those monsters watching her. Even without eyes, she could feel their gazes, gauging her behavior, tracking her movements. Their runes glowed in greyish blues and purples, so easy to pick out in the gloom of everything.

She’s wound tighter than a spring after avoiding creeps and being on her best behavior all day. Detention had been grueling; there’d been nothing for her to pretend to do to appease the teacher in the first place, and it had won that staring contest a thousand times over, runes glittering like morse code until everyone was released.

Trudging home, she feels the weight of her helplessness pressing in from all directions. She has no way of contacting Patti, she can’t even get within five feet of Tsubaki, and though she has half a mind to march over to Black Star’s apartment and kick his door down, Fake-Papa will blink accusingly at her if she arrives home too late. (He’s neither her father nor human and yet had still managed to impose a curfew upon her.)

Patti’s suspension will end after the weekend, but if today is Thursday (it’s hard to keep track, anymore), Maka won’t get a chance to talk to her for another three days, and that feels too dangerously far away to wait around and simply  _hope_  her only comrade hasn’t disappeared into the black.

Every house, every cloud in the sky, every streetlamp is artificial, each lie building up in her mind. Even the weeds growing in the cracks of the sidewalk are counterfeit. The further she walks, the more futile everything seems, which only makes her more frustrated and furious. Maka finds herself directing her anger at The Voice, of all things; she hasn’t heard from him in days, and he’d promised to get her out of this horrible place, hadn’t he?

She regrets accusing him even as she thinks it. She shouldn’t blame someone who firstly: may be trying to help her, and secondly: may be a damned figment of her imagination. Her reality is a lie, and she thinks it will slowly consume her friends and herself but she has no idea how to stop it. She feels like a candle that bears a hollow space where the wick is supposed to be. It’s a precise, fundamental kind of uselessness.

How can she do any of this alone?

Maka’s neck cranes back as she searches for a color she knows isn’t there. “I will try harder tomorrow,” she threatens the ashen sky, daring it to grow angry with glyphs; it does nothing.

This is when she notices hatches and obsidian skittering in her peripheral vision, slowing down on the road. To her wariness, the shadow-vehicle pulls up next to her. Darkness writhes, a window rolls down, and Maka is startled to see Tsubaki behind the wheel.

In reply to her stunned silence, the young woman says, “Just get in.”

It takes her a bile-swallowing moment to discern the door handle of the car,  _touch it_ _,_  and voluntarily seat herself inside what feels like the digestion tract of a nightmare. Maka perches rigidly on her seat, trying to come into contact with the least amount of the car as possible. Tsubaki gives her a haggard look, but doesn’t mention Maka’s awkward aversions.

“Look,” she says, rolling up the passenger window. “I don’t know how to help you. But you seem really… alone. So, if this is the only thing I can do, I’ll do it.” She stares at Maka expectantly afterward, but Maka doesn’t have any inkling as to what is appropriate to say.

“W-what are you doing, exactly?” she ventures, because if Tsubaki had come to the conclusion that ‘helping’ her entails driving her to an insane asylum, she’ll just go ahead and throw herself from the car now.

Tsubaki blinks, takes a breath, and looks over her shoulder as she merges back into false traffic. “I’m taking you to Patti Thompson’s house,” she primly says. “I was just going to give you the address, but then I remembered you probably couldn’t read it anyway. So.”

“…Oh,” Maka says, gingerly covering her face with her hands. She’d been trying not to cry today, but maybe since it’s more bittersweet than despairing, it’s not against the rules. “Thank you,” she whispers into her fingers.

 

* * *

 

The address leads to something posing as the left half of a duplex, nestled in a long line of identical replicas. Tsubaki waits in the car while Maka raps on the front door. She notes where the sun hangs in the sky as she waits for someone to answer; Fake-Papa will be flashing up a storm when she gets home, today.

Locks scrape behind the door and Maka is coolly greeted by a face and shoulder tilting into view. Liz Thompson is a tall woman with thinner, longer hair than her sister, but those glacial eyes are dead-ringers. Liz only opens the door about a foot wide, peeking from around the edge. The skin underneath her eyes is slightly shadowed, like she’d applied makeup to hide a bad night’s sleep.

A well-shaped eyebrow rises, skeptical. “Yes?”

Maka debates on how best to start a conversation with a stranger without sounding like she’s certifiable. She knows Liz does not exactly support The World Isn’t Real movement, and Maka doesn’t want the door slammed in her face before she even gets a chance to check on Patti. She wears her best smile. “Hi! My name’s Maka Albarn, I’m a friend of Patti’s. Is she arou–”

 **“You.”**  Liz’s eyes narrow, a scowl marring her face.  _“_ _You’re_  Maka? Lemme guess, you’ve been ‘brainwashed’ too, right?”

It belatedly occurs to Maka that she should have given just about any other name than her own. Her mouth opens but she has no response that wouldn’t somehow inflame the situation.

Liz opens the door another six inches and sneers, standing tall. “You don’t even gotta say it. Listen.  _Stay away from my sister, **get it?**_   She’s…” Her glare suddenly softens, diverting away. “She’s not herself. And you’re just making her worse, okay? So leave her alone!”

And just before the door is slammed in her face, Maka glimpses Liz Thompson’s hands. They’d been charred and ashen, black like charcoal, runes faintly glowing on what should have been skin.

 

* * *

 

Tsubaki looks surprised she’s even touching her. Though her mouth is pulled into a worried sort of grimace, she allows Maka to turn her hands over and inspect her fingers. When she says, “You have no intention of taking the make-up midterms, do you,” it doesn’t sound like a drastic change of subject, but more of a kind of resignation to the state of things.

Maka doesn’t remind her that she can’t read things anymore. She says nothing, only returning her friend’s hands.

Tsubaki sighs– she’s been doing that a lot, lately– and backs out of the Thompson’s driveway. “I guess it didn’t go that well.”

“Not really.”

“You look like you’re about to pass out.”

“Oh.”

Huffing, Tsubaki says, “Don’t ‘oh’, tell me what happened!”

Maka’s eyes are drawn back to Tsubaki’s hands, which grip the murky steering wheel. Dread burns in her bones. She hesitates telling her what she’d seen– every time she tells the truth, her friends seem further away. She avoids the question, because she won’t lie. Instead, she hollowly asks, “Where are we going?”

“Black Star’s,” Tsubaki replies, not looking exceedingly surprised that Maka changed the subject. “He’s been moody and weird since you two fought and I’m… I’m tired of both of you being so shut off.”

Moody and weird indicate that he’s still alive, so Maka lets out a quiet breath of relief. For a few moments, the car doesn’t feel as threatening. In the not entirely awkward silence, she realizes the radio is on. For once, it isn’t a song of static.

“What is this playing?” she asks, secretly gratified to say words that feel like a normal things meant for normal conversations.

Tsubaki makes a quick glance to her radio before watching the road again. “I didn’t even realize it was on. I don’t know.” She blindly reaches for the shadowy knob that is the volume control and gently turns it up. “It’s kind of familiar, isn’t it?”

Maka listens more closely to the chiming notes, and wonders why she can hear them at all. “No, I don’t recognize it.”

 

* * *

 

When they knock on Black Star’s door, no one answers.


	3. behind darkness, beneath candles

It occurs to her that Black Star may be displaying the symptoms of someone whose world has gone dark, but she doesn’t allow herself to think any further along that train of thought. She wouldn’t know whether to pray none of it is true, or hope it really is. In either case, Maka can’t find a way to ease Tsubaki’s worrying; Black Star has stopped answering text messages.

Maka slinks to the first lunch hour, jittery with nervous unease. Patti is due back from suspension today, and Maka can’t help but be tormented at the thought of Liz’s black, smokey hands spreading the nightmare to her younger sister.

She’s there, though– all golden and colorful and swamped by jet ink. She greets Maka in a falsely-ringing blitheness.

“Sis is gettin’ mad at me,” Patti says into her crossed arms. She rests her head on the long lunch table, food ignored. “Says I’m bein’ rude. I can’t help that her boyfriend is one of these creeps,” she complains, blue eyes pointedly following the closest student stand-in as it makes juvenile, animated expressions to its neighbor. “Every time they make out is a friggen’ horror movie.”

Maka tries to imagine what that might look like, but stops herself before the image gets out of hand. “They’ve been together long?” she asks, trying to avoid bringing up Liz’s ashen hands and the runes that glowed in her veins. Patti looks like death warmed over, and bringing up something of that magnitude feels a little tactless.

“Yeah, since we were on the street… or– wait.” The younger girl rubs her face on a forearm, eyebrows scrunched. “I’m not sure anymore. I wanna say since I started school, but I… I can’t remember when that was.” Patti’s head slowly raises from her arms in a type of dazed confusion. “I know he’s not real, but Lizzy was dating someone else, I thought? W-when was that?”

Worried, Maka drops her voice low, hunching across the table. “When you went to Shibusen, you mean?”

Her blood runs cold at Patti’s blank expression. It’s then she notices that the entire cafeteria is frozen, shadows poised on their conversation. Glyphs crest across their bodies in flickering waves, as if all the students in the vicinity are the collective black backdrop for a silver-runed beast that shifts and watches.

Maka doesn’t breathe. The only sound in the room comes from the sophomore across from her.

“Shibusen?” Patti repeats, the word sounding awkward on her tongue. Her glacial eyes gloss over, tears threatening to spill with the slightest provocation. She plasters a lopsided smile, somewhat embarrassed. “You know, I’m really sad all of a sudden. What’s with that?”

 

* * *

 

Her knuckles are white around her spoon. She won’t. She _won’t_. Her body trembles, quaking at the kitchen table, and Fake-Papa sits at her left, miming the over-exaggerated movements of a human enjoying its meal.

On her spoon, shadows overlay, edges seeping out of formation like the messy aftermath of a children’s coloring book. She hadn’t noticed it before, but the runes in her food glitter like everything else. They’re nearly microscopic, but she sees the breathing of the gloaming; Maka watches her food watching her.

She’s taking too long. Fake-Papa watches, waiting. She thinks of Patti forgetting the one thing that had allowed her to hold her head high, and Maka fears the same end. Which is the lesser evil, here? Eating the lie or suffering the consequences of not playing the role of the obedient daughter?

Supper tastes like the nothing everything else is. It violates her.

 

* * *

 

Her nightmares feature her fingers turning to pitch and speaking in luminescent code to the universe, reporting her rebellious behavior. When she wakes, her hands are the same as always, and it’s another day with blood on the empty wind. Throughout the day, she waits for some catch– some consequence from eating– but hell is as usual as hell can be, which may, in itself, be the consequence.

Black Star skips school again. “I’m sure he’s fine,” she never, ever says to Tsubaki. Instead, she says, “Maybe we should try visiting him again, today?”

Tsubaki eats her home-packed lunch while Maka looks away and does everything in her power to not hurl. “I have choir practice today,” she murmurs. “…He always comes to watch, though. He promised.” The way she says it doesn’t sound as absolute as the words might otherwise imply. “Will you come?” she asks.

Maka hasn’t been to Tsubaki’s choir rehearsals in a long time. “Maybe I shouldn’t be there,” she reluctantly says. “If he’s still mad at me... Ah, it’s not like I could go, anyway. I have detention today.”

“Again?”

Glancing over at Tsubaki, she attempts a wan smile, but it’s so overused that it is, at best, a grimace. Tsubaki’s eyes flicker down to whatever it is she believes she’s eating, and appears to contemplate the squiggles that only Maka sees.

“Right.”

 

* * *

 

Apart from the guttural moans from bizarre and horrifying creatures, she can only hear the voices of four people, and two of them appear to be on non-speaking terms with her. So it’s as she’s sitting in detention, lamenting her inability to hear anything remotely beautiful, when she hears it.

A cell phone chimes in the middle of the room. The blank-faced overseer breaks into choreographed argument with the student guilty of having a phone on. The whole display comes off strangely genuine; more candid than usual. Then Maka realizes _she can hear the phone ringing_. She freezes with undiluted, gut-clenching horror. She’d eaten with Fake-Papa last night– is she merging back into the unreality? 

Her breaths come in short, panicked gasps as the phone keeps chiming on, little notes breaking through static. The shadow student appears unable to stop the noise, no matter how angry the fake teacher becomes. It’s wrong. It should not be happening. It isn’t part of the lie.

It isn’t a lie.

Maka’s dread morphs into an uncontrollable, starving desperation. She’s heard this song once before! Or was it twice? Once in Tsubaki’s car, and once when… when had that been? And as she tries to recall where else she has heard this unique melody, Maka feels herself align. With what, she has no idea, but there is an unmistakable sense of connection, of being one side of a set of metal teeth, zipping up together with its counterpart. The black classroom surrounding her bleeds away, and she is suddenly staring down at checkered red and black framing her shoes.

Looking up, she takes in a flash of a face and a surprised call of her name before her mind is overwhelmed with alien emotions that aren’t her own. That flash is all she can take before the experience ends, the alignment warping, the colors of the place she’d just seen snapping off like a light. But, just before it all vanishes like waking from a dream, she’d seen it: the black gloss of a piano, stretching calm and serene like the surface of a lake with depths unfathomable; a peculiar candle, complete with wick, alight in blue flame; and a face.

The music fades, the voice fades, but she refuses to let that face go. She will remember every detail, every expression. The surprise. The familiarity. The sound of her name on his tongue, practiced and reflexive– not a form of address, but a vessel of memory, letters nuanced with experience, history and truth crammed into two syllables. Holds his face: olive complexion tinted in purples and blues from strange, intimate candlelight; pale hair, borderline haphazard in an imitation of chaos; intense gaze with eyes that burn with a color she’d forgotten after so many days in the dark.

She will keep it. She will not let them take him from her.

Maka opens her eyes, back in the wrong world, every flickering shadow in the room staring at her with empty faces. Her skin crawls. She has just done something she was not supposed to do. And yet, though terror courses through her in wake of the monsters’ undivided, pernicious attention, Maka smiles in a wrathful kind of victory, even as the shadows coalesce into something else– something united, en masse, with leather-like wings and a hulking body, its long spindles of limbs ending in curved claws.

“Maka!” someone calls, voice muffled, and she bolts out of her desk, turning to the wall of windows behind her. A crop of blue hair peeks up over the sill. Black Star pulls himself up, face slowly coming into view, and she almost doesn’t recognize him with his messy hair and haggard face. He sees her, but his eyes travel over her shoulder, further into the room behind her, jaw going slack and eyes widening in shock.

She doesn’t look. Maka wrenches the window open and scrambles out of it.

 

* * *

 

Though it had started with her pulling him away from the building, their roles eventually reverse. She never could beat his mile. “The fuck was–” he starts to say, but then he looks at her and finally stops outside the small performance arts building on the other side of campus, letting her catch her breath.

She’s winded. “Star–”

“I’m sorry.”

She can only stare at him, lungs burning for air.

“I get it. Sorry. For before.”

Maka bows over, hands on her knees as she sucks in air, and looks back the way they came. They hadn’t been followed by that thing, but the trunks of the nearby trees are agitated, runes twisting around like angry termites. She earnestly looks up at him, and in between breaths, she asks, “What color is the sky, Star?”

His hair stands out like a monument against the grays and blacks. “It isn’t one,” he replies.

Trying to breathe is difficult, and needing to cry on top of it is even more so- her body kind of stumbles trying to do both at once. “ _Sorry_ ,” she quails into her hands. She repeats it over and over, a rosary of apologies, feeling awful for being happy; her best friend is stuck in hell with her.

After awhile, Black Star crouches down next to her, apparently not having a lot of practice in being comforting, and ends up simply withholding any usual mockery for being such a crybaby. “What was that thing, anyway?”

Maka shakes her head, trying to find any dry spots on her hands to wipe her face. “I don’t know. I did something that pissed them off.”

He shifts, eager for more information. “You what?”

“I… dreamed? Only I wasn’t asleep.” Which sounds more and more like a hallucination the more she thinks about it. “I saw someone. He saw me. He knew me. But it was only for a second.” His face is still there, preserved in memory. She closes her eyes, flooding her mind with the colors of that place, savoring it. “When I snapped out of it, those things were angry. And they turned into that…whatever it is.”

Black Star digests this a few moments, distrustfully eyeing their surroundings before he admits, “I stopped eating.” He rocks on his heels a little, still full of energy after having run so far. “I dunno. You seemed pretty serious the other day, and...well. I dreamed too, maybe. I saw this–” He rolls up the short sleeve of his tee-shirt and presents the star tattoo on his shoulder.

It looks pristine as always. She remembers the day he got it– and then she supposes that day might not have been real. “…What about it?”

He frowns. “It’s wrong.” His palms runs across the ink. “I remember. There’s supposed to be a scar. It wouldn’t heal for anything, and I kept pickin’ at it so it would stay longer. It was important, for…for some reason.” He rolls the sleeve back down, resting his hand over his shoulder as his eyebrows crinkle in concentration. “But it’s gone. And it pisses me off, and I can’t remember why, and everything went to fucking crazytown and damn it, Maka!” Black Star stands and begins to pace, as agitated as the voyeuristic foliage surrounding them. “What are we doing here?! This isn’t how we’re supposed to live! This world is too small!”  

Fury paints his face, but Maka catches the simmering alarm underneath. Black Star never could stand feeling confined.

“I know. I’ve been trying to find out what the point of it all is, but any time I learn something, those things start to– Black Star, my fake dad made me eat last night,” she blurts.

The tendons in his neck jump as he swallows nothing. “You good?”

“I felt awful, but when I woke up this morning, I was fine. But have I changed? I’m not, like, changing colors, right?”

Warily looking her over, he says, “Well you don’t look great- actually, you kinda look like you got too friendly with a steamroller–” She glowers at him. “–but you’re the same since I seen you last. Whaddya mean ‘changing colors’?”

“Patti’s sister– they’re both real too, by the way– she… Her hands were…” Maka can’t stop from looking at her own hands, slowly flexing her fingers and imagining them covered in ashen, larval shadows. She chokes down the cresting panic that is ever closer to flooding over as each day wears on. “I think the more you believe the lie, you start turning into one.”

When she finally pulls her eyes away from her hands, she watches Black Star become granite, his face hardening with a near-disturbing determination she has never seen in him– yet distantly feels she may have seen hundreds of times before. “We need to get Tsu,” he says.

Maka nods with quick jerks of her chin. “I know. I know I know I know, but she doesn’t want to know! She’ll do anything to not know.”

He grins then, but it’s not at all friendly and it kind of makes her feel very small. With a hand under her arm, he hoists her upright, tugging her along to the auditorium. “I’ll convince her,” he says, voice low and, Maka thinks, somewhat despairing. “I dreamed more about her than anything else.”

 

* * *

 

The darkness of the gaping auditorium makes the both of them falter for a moment. Still, Tsubaki’s gentle alto echoes from within as she practices her part with a choir only she can see.

“I never miss rehearsals,” Black Star says to himself more than Maka before he darts into the shadows without any further hesitation. Maka steels herself and hurries after him, trying to keep her thoughts from lingering on the fact that those creatures could be anywhere in the building– hell, the building itself may be sentient.

They see Tsubaki on stage, shining like a bright star on a dark night, and Black Star crows some incomprehensible battle cry at the top of his lungs as he speeds down the center aisle, leaping on stage in the middle of rehearsal. Tsubaki’s lovely voice shatters, the graceless, raw sound signalling the finality of every guise of peace.

Immediately, the cavernous room begins to glow in blues and purples, chittering shadows lighting up in anger. Maka scrambles on stage as well, trying to block out the glittering mass that swells around them.

“Black Star,” Tsubaki says, face pale and eyes wide, “what are you–”

“ _ **Attention shart stains**_ ,” he announces in a voice that rattles Maka’s chest cavity. Maka hurries to Tsubaki, who stands frozen in horrified dismay. “ ** _I am the law here, and your face is illegal!_** ”

Tsubaki cries out in furious desperation and Black Star punches her choir instructor in the face.

 

* * *

 

Maka isn’t the only one reluctant to get in a fake car, so the edge of the school parking lot is as far as the three of them get before Tsubaki boils over with uncontrollable frustration.

“I can’t deal with you!” she screeches at Black Star, out of breath from being dragged at breakneck speeds out of the auditorium. Then, instead of climbing decibels, Tsubaki’s voice grows quiet and deadly, hissing through her teeth. “You don’t answer my texts, you never answered the door, and you appear like everything’s okay and–”

“Woah, no, nothing is okay right now–”

“-you punched Dr. Law! And you expect me to just go along with everything?”

Black Star doesn’t bother avoiding the bookbag that comes flying at him; there’s only one person in the world he would never dodge, and she’s swinging fifteen pounds of education at him. “I thought you were sick! I was worried! I was–”

“Tsubaki,” Maka tries to interject, but has nothing helpful to say.

“I worked so hard.” She slowly stops swinging her bag, the straps going slack in her hands as it rests on the ground. She looks at Black Star with such tortured affection that it makes Maka’s chest feel tight. Tsubaki can’t finish any of her sentences, tears trapped in her long lashes. “You just. My record. My scholarship. And you. Star, you look awful–”

Black Star faintly shrugs. “I didn’t eat for four days,” he says, face grave.

Tsubaki’s forehead is a constant state of wrinkled. She looks over at Maka, who only stands with under her gaze with a crushing sense of guilt like she had somehow spread an anti-food disease.

“I’m the odd one out now, aren’t I?” Tsubaki says, voice lilting.

Black Star takes the bag from her hand and shoulders it himself. “Yeah.”

Maka holds Tsubaki’s eyes. “We had to get you out of there.”

Tsubaki shakes her head, “I know that you… that the both of you believe you’re…” Her eyes suddenly flit away, looking over Maka’s head in an eerie reenactment of Black Star outside the detention hall’s window. “Why are there so many people here after school,” she slowly asks.

Whirling around, Maka sees a malicious mob flowing out of the various doors of the school building, groups of the creatures merging together to form tall, hulking monstrosities. Their batlike wings stretch high, carving black shards out of the grey sky.

Black Star has a change of heart. “Shit, okay, we’ll take the car,” he blurts, taking Tsubaki’s hand and wrenching her to her usual parking spot.

Maka watches those things surge across the courtyard, heading for them, so unified in their pursuit that she experiences a fear she’d never known existed before.

“Albarn!” Black Star shouts from far ahead, and Maka turns around, fear pushing her legs faster than they’d ever been for gym class. The three of them don’t make it far.

“Who are those people in my car?!” Tsubaki exclaims, digging in her heels and stopping a few spaces away from the vehicle. Inside the cross-hatched blob that is her car, forms emerge, peeling away from the seats and the dashboard, a soup of shadow creatures swimming behind the windows.

Tsubaki seizes her bookbag from Black Star and begins rummaging through it. “This is crazy,” she wheezes, eyes white around her irises. “I’m calling the police.”

“There’s no time, Tsu,” Maka urges, watching all the cars around them fill up with darkness, the winged mob from the school filtering between the vehicles, approaching them.

“No! I feel like if I don’t do something normal right now, I’ll–  _AH!_ ”

Her swirling dream-phone clatters to the asphalt in silent-film noiselessness. Tsubaki stares at it, rapidly blinking. She gives no resistance when Black Star yanks her forward to run. She says nothing about the phone, leaving it behind in the parking lot with all the other nightmares.

As to what she had seen in that split second, Maka doesn’t ask. There's no need.

 

* * *

 

The creatures cease their pursuit after a few blocks. Neither Maka nor Black Star can fathom why. Tsubaki won’t stop shivering.

“It’s a dream, right?” she says to no one. “A dream. The student body chased us and then suddenly dissolved into thin air. Only dreams can do that.”

Though his posture speaks of fearlessness, Black Star’s eyes dart to every tree, every car, every stoplight with suspicion. “You gonna make it, Tsu?” he asks, tone flippant and so very false.

“Yeah. I’m fine. It’s a bad dream,” Tsubaki says, rattling like a dried flower in a storm. “I must’ve studied all night again, ha ha.”

Maka takes in Tsubaki’s pale face and taut smile. People simply aren’t meant to handle things like this so quickly. When she thinks about it, Tsubaki is being forced to rationalize in a few minutes what Black Star had in four days, and Maka in several weeks. She takes one of her friend’s hands and keeps it with hers. To Black Star, she says, “We gotta get to Patti. And her sister. Those things–”

Black Star practically bares his teeth at her. “Hell no. I’m not doing a damn thing until us three are all seein’ the same shit.”

She growls, frustrated and worried for Patti, but concedes that he has a point. If Tsubaki sees a fake police officer, she doesn’t want to think what might happen. “I still don’t get why they gave up.”

“Don’t jinx it, man.”

“Why would they bother chasing you when they already know where you’ll go?” Tsubaki interjects, voice eerily calm though her fingers still tremble between Maka’s. “Ah, right. Yes. They were mad– that’s why they chased us. I looked up her address, and they got mad. Ha ha, there goes the scholarship. This is just another nightmare.”

After hearing Tsubaki’s little speech, Black Star looks like he might be sick, which is so surreal it might be a nightmare in its own right. “I vote we go anywhere but the squashmore’s place.”

“We’ll go to your apartment,” Tsubaki says. “Your parents are never home to ask questions.”

Maka wants to argue that the presence or lack of people is probably a moot point given how those shadow bat-things formed out of Tsubaki’s dashboard, destruction birthed by the inanimate; wherever they flee will be no less potentially hazardous than anywhere else.

However, before she can voice any of her opinions, Black Star replies, “Yeah, I guess not, huh,” and it’s spoken so quietly that it makes her words die in her throat.

 

* * *

 

His parents don’t exist. Like math problems and her father’s love, they are intangible and senseless, presumed into reality by the power of suggestion. He’d been imagining them, always busy, always working late and leaving early, always depositing lunch money on the kitchen counter for him every morning.

“I kept thinkin’ to myself that I’d seen them a few days ago, but now that I really think about it…” He looks in the direction of the shadowy dining table with its one chair. “It’s just me, here. I’ve always been alone.”

Black Star’s shoulders are hunched, his very body avoiding everything in the room instead of forcing his surroundings to adapt and appreciate his existence. Maka sits on the floor, fiddling with the straps of Tsubaki’s bookbag; it’s colorful– _real_ – and she can’t stop herself from running her hands across it in reverence. Tsubaki, herself, is nestled in the corner of the sludge-like couch, believing it to be comforting. Despite everything, the sky is still blue, for her. At least she has stopped shivering.

“Of course you haven’t,” Tsubaki insists. “They live here! They took me on vacation with you. To the beach. I remember.”

Maka feels Black Star’s glance. She looks up at him; he gestures to Tsubaki. A pang snaps through her body as she remembers her father draining away from her memory, and for what or who she is going to help erase from Tsubaki’s.

“What are their names?” she bluntly asks her.

Tsubaki stiffens on the couch, alert and cautious. “…What?”

“Black Star’s parents. What are their names?”

“I called them by their last name,” Tsubaki says, blinking rapidly. Her shoulders twitch. “I never learned–”

“What is it, then? ‘Mr. and Mrs.’ what?”

The shivering starts up, again. Tsubaki brings her hands to the collar of her rumpled uniform, clutching it like it’s choking her. “Why are you asking me this?” she blurts, quailing under the rapid, insistent questions.

Black Star asks, “What’s my last name, Tsubaki?”

The girl’s eyes clench shut. “S-Stop it!” she cries. “Isn’t it enough that I’m playing along?!”

Maka feels dizzy as she tries to remember Black Star’s family name, too. All her memory returns to her is a hollow blank.

Black Star skips around to a different attack. “When was the last time you saw my family?”

Tsubaki launches from the sofa, standing tall yet looking cornered with her panicked eyes. “I should go home, my parents will be worried about me.” She hurries to the front door of the apartment, abandoning her belongings in lieu of escape.

But she freezes when, voice low, Black Star asks, “And your brother too, right?” And slowly, as if the air has become thick to move through, Tsubaki turns her head back to him.

“I don’t have any brothers,” she thinly says.

Maka is only audience to the dreams Black Star has had of Tsubaki. He is ruthless with them, each question breaking Tsubaki into splinters.

“Are you sure, Tsu?”

“Of course I’m–”

“An older brother. Tall. You wanted to find him. He’s why you even talked to me.”

Tsubaki shakes her head, her breathing uneven. “N-no, I’ve never had–”

“You and I met so you could find your brother.”

“No! NO, we met in history class! I’ve never had a b… a brother…”

Even Maka is enraptured, an image she doesn’t recognize rushing in from all sides: Black Star marching up an endless mountain of steps, Tsubaki gracefully walking behind him, and a sense of the two having been in each other’s lives for much longer than this world would lead them to believe.

Tsubaki’s eyes are glazing over, her hands trembling near her mouth.

“Are you sure? Are you sure you don’t remember his face?”

For a moment, Maka had expected Tsubaki’s wail to somehow be pretty– like a song; like all of her– but no noise escapes her as she cries silently into her hands.

 

* * *

 

They huddle close to each other on the kitchen floor, but this time they can all see the linoleum for what it is. Eyes still red-rimmed from hours of emotional and mental breakdown, Tsubaki taps the squirming floor with an experimental fingernail. Maka can’t determine if she has actually calmed down or is riding a smooth, apathetic wave of shock. Either way, it’s an improvement over before.

Tsubaki’s hair is a dark shroud that blends into the unreality. “I feel like I’ve been betrayed by my own shadow,” she says absently, voice hoarse. “Even if we do go back to the Thompson’s house, what can we do? We can’t punch the world to death.”

“Says you,” Black Star replies. “Who needs plans? That chick needs our help, right?” he asks Maka.

Despite the futility of the situation, Maka thinks this is the happiest she’s felt in a long time. “Mm. And her sister, too.”

She tells them everything she knows. She tells them about Patti and Liz’s glacial eyes. She tells them about the voice she hears, promising to help her escape. She tells them what he looks like. They shake their heads, unfamiliar with anyone with white hair and red eyes.

Tsubaki evidently sees something in the tile, because she pulls her hand away and shudders. “If that voice implied we’re trapped, and we assume that this really is a dream of some kind...”

“But what’s the fucking point?” Black Star huffs. “What do they get out of brainwashing and shitty mid-terms?”

The runes crawling on Patti’s sister’s hands flash behind Maka’s eyes. “If they keep us docile, they can turn us into them.”

Tsubaki makes a worrisome noise. “So, they keep us dreaming, here in this… ‘place’, and what then? Do we die in the real world when we’re out of time?”

None of them have anything to say about that for a good two minutes, but Black Star eventually blurts, “That’s the shittiest, cowardliest way to murder a dude I’ve ever heard!”

No one disagrees.

“I wonder what we’re like, out there,” Tsubaki muses.

“Pfft. We’re exactly the same. Even if you’re dreamin’, you’re still you.”

“Well, yes, but are we friends?”

“Of course you are,” Maka says. “You and Black Star found your brother, right?”

“All three of us are. I know it.” Black Star kicks his shoe out across the floor and knocks it into Maka’s. “Never doubt the word of a god.”

Though she tries her best, Maka’s voice is somewhat hollow when she repeats, “All three of us.” Self-loathing creeps under her skin– she should be grateful her two friends are here with her, but she still can’t help but feel lonely. The face she’d seen in her dream remains burned into memory, his call of her name insistent and desperate. The thought of Patti and her sister equally makes ‘all three of us’ sound inadequate.

Surely they’re all real. Surely they’ll all be waiting.

“Does ‘Shibusen’ mean anything to you guys?” she asks. “Patti said it’s the name of a school she goes to. Or should be going to, I guess.” Maka watches the two of them mull the name in their minds as they share their silent-confidant glance. “After her suspension, she didn’t remember it anymore. I think knowing it made her a target, and they… took it from her.”

“Shibusen?” they slowly say in unison, and that’s when everything changes.

The apartment darkens, feeling ominous and claustrophobic, closing in around them. Yet, even as the walls begin to bend, Black Star’s forehead crinkles with intense thought, and Tsubaki ignores the static of the kitchen as she stares through Maka, seeing something far away.

“A school?” The apartment is so dark that only Tsubaki’s pale face is visible between long curtains of her hair.

“There’s this classroom,” Black Star haltingly offers. “Real big. A perfect audience for center stage.”

The room begins to flicker with blues and purples.

“It curved,” Tsubaki adds, hands absently gesturing a half-moon shape. “Maka sat next to us. And next to… a boy. He had–”

“White hair–”

“–and red eyes.”

Maka’s heart trips. Her ears pound with her erratic pulse, fingers clenching in her clothes as she reaches for a memory. It falls from her lips, even as the world warps around them, shadows shifting and breathing in the edges of her vision.

“He always slept through class.”

And then he’s there, voice amazed and at home in her ear.

_“Maka, are you dreaming together?”_

The last noise she hears is her own breath being harshly sucked in a gasp.

 

* * *

 

She breathes out, aligned with him. She’s on her feet, her body firmly held against his.

Like last time, it’s strange. Alien, invasive, overwhelming. In reflex, she struggles, but he says, “Easy, hey. It’s okay. There’s no rush when we’re here, remember?”

Her voice is muffled against him. “The others–”

“They’re fine for the moment. Just relax for a second, Maka, please? I’m barely holding the resonance together.”

Resonance? Hesitant, she opens her eyes, finding her cheek resting near his shoulder. The fabric of his suit is silken and warm on her face. The room smells like burning wicks.

Her mind swims with dizzying images and trains of thought she can’t make heads or tails of. He’d asked her to relax, but she doesn’t think it’s even close to being possible. She stiffens when his arms briefly tighten around her, squeezing her gently before he leans back to look at her.

His eyes are sad, though his lips bend into a crooked smile. “You don’t know me, do you,” he says, his despair oozing through her veins, thick and heavy.

“I want to. I feel like I do, but… there’s just–”

He searches her face, and how is it she can feel his relief in seeing her open eyes? Does he know she feels the same when she looks at him? It’s a torturous, bittersweet relief, like scratching a rash. To see him and speak with him yet still feel an aching gulf separating them is frustration enough to make her eyes water.

“Do you remember anything?”

She doesn’t have to answer. He already seems to know. Hands sliding away, he sits down heavily in a high-backed chair, sighing and combing his fingers through his thick hair. She feels his eyes on her as she walks around the red and black room, taking in all the color.

“Is this place real?”

She feels his own irritation as he fumbles over an answer. “…Sort of.”

Maka whirls on him, voice steely. “So it’s a lie.”

“No, it’s… Urgh.”

“So it’s real?”

“Not exactly?”

She huffs. “Which is it then!”

“Argh, calm down, you’re making my head hurt,” he gripes, digging the heels of his palms into his eyes. “This is a place within my mind. We’re connected right now, so you’re here with me. The Black Room is more real than…wherever you are now,” he finishes, voice subdued.

He looks exhausted. He  _feels_  exhausted, his weariness echoing across her bones.

She's torn between wanting to shake his feelings away and hoarding how second-nature they feel. Maka touches the still-warm wax dripping off a tapered candle. “Have we been here before?”

“Many times,” he quietly says, hints of pride and longing both flavoring his voice.

She turns to see him, how his slouch looks right at home in his chair. “I think I… dreamed of this place.”

The owner of the voice perks up at this. “Really? Do you remember anything?”

“I think we were dancing,” she says, hearing her voice echo across the checkered tile. She takes a step closer to him, wanting to close the distance. “That’s pretty silly, isn’t it?”

“No,” he says, serious. He doesn’t elaborate on it, though. “Geeze, how am I gonna explain this without you remembering anything about… ugh. Maka. The five of you are caught in a witch’s trap. When we killed her–”

Maka stumbles. “W-what? Killed? What do you mean ‘killed’?!”

He blinks, at a loss for words. “…Yes. Despite the peace treaty, she attacked members of Shibusen. Both the coven and Death deemed it necessary to stop her–”

“Whoa whoa, wait–  **Death?!”**

“Just listen! God, how is it _I’m_ the one teaching you– this is shit.” He scrubs his hair, frustrated. “Okay. You guys are asleep. The spell has trapped each one of you in some kind of dream that keeps you occupied while it slowly absorbs you and sucks out your soul. Are we good so far?”

“I’m starting to think you’re the one dreaming, to be honest–”

Bursting from his chair, he hurries to her and places his hands around her shoulders. “I’m serious, okay?  _Killing the witch_ _didn’t stop the spell_ _._  The traps are self-sustaining– it’s using your soul to shield you as you die,” he says, worried eyes latching onto hers. His words become hoarse and strained. “I can’t… I can’t wake you up. I’ve tried everything, Maka, you’re  _wasting away!”_

She catches a glimpse of what he’s seen– sees a poorly-constructed doll made in her image trapped in a translucent husk of twisting fibers and blood– and suddenly she’s holding his face between her hands, peering into his eyes as if they can somehow allow her more into his mind than she already is. “That’s me?” she chokes out before realizing what she’s doing. She stumbles back. “Sorry.”

His hands slide down, taking her own into his larger palms. “We can’t do anything for you guys from the outside. You have to fight it. It’s witch magic, but your soul was meant to cancel that shit out. You should be able to destroy it from the inside and wake everyone up.”

She tries to make sense of what he’s saying. She cancels out the nightmare? Was that why she recovered so quickly after eating with Fake-Papa? “But fight it how?” she demands. “They’re everywhere! The monsters… they’re not just the teachers and students– they come out of the walls! They’re everything!” The small reprieve in this room is quickly replaced by the hopelessness she is more accustomed to. “I can’t even use a weapon, Soul!  _What am I supposed to do?”_

Instead of answering her, he abruptly smiles, his sharp teeth temporarily distracting her. He’s elated, his happiness plowing through her. She pulls her hands away from his and holds them against her forehead. “Ugh, what–” she cries, suffering from his emotional overload. She hopes he can feel her irritation. “I wasn’t telling you good news!”

“You said my name.”

Her arms slowly fall to her sides. She blinks owlishly. “It just sorta came out, I– … _Soul?”_

His smile broadens. “I’ll be your weapon,” he says, proud. “I’ll give you part of me.”

 

* * *

 

Goosebumps fly across her skin as she merges back with the nightmare, face to face with Black Star and Tsubaki.

“Maka! Are you okay?”

“Dude, you looked like you went to the mothership or something.” Black star holds three fingers in front of her face. “How many is this?”

Before she can swat his hand out of the way, all three of them see the fluttering glyph that peels off the linoleum floor and floats away like a flake of ash. The room is brightening, the encroaching, shadowy corners bleeding away.

She hears it– Soul’s song, she now knows– and she nearly dives for Tsubaki’s backpack. All around them, more runes evaporate from the walls and countertops, spent and lifeless. Maka digs inside the bag, her hands curling around the edge of something warm– warm as his suit under her cheek– and she gently slides it out.

Glowing like the sun, howling for blood with a power she almost knows, is a book.


End file.
